Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/755

 GOTHIC

675

GOTHIC

after the great abbey was finished in all its beauty England went on as before. By this time the stylistic quality of English Gothic had been pretty well frxed in such works as Beverley choir and transepts; Christ Church and St. Patrick's, Dublin; Ely presbytery, Southwell choir, Netley and Rievaubc Abbeys, to- gether with the " Nine Altars" of Durham and Foun- tains, all completed between the years 1225 and 1250, the peculiar qualities of English work had taken on a definite and very beautiful form. This is the period usually denominated "Early English", and, while it shows no particular advance in structural develop- ment, it records a notable change in point of design; nearly all the attention of the builders seems devoted to solving the problems of beauty in form and line, in detail and composition — this chiefly in the interior treatment. The relations of the arcade, triforium, and clerestory, the varying designs of the latter with their subtile arrangements of slender shafts and deli- cate lancets; the beautiful pier sections and moulding profiles, together with the sculpture of capitals, bosses, crockets, and terminals — varj-ing as between the many sub-schools of the four main architectural prov- inces, yet always marked by a quality of pure beauty seldom attained even in the Ile-de-France — all are sig- nificant of a distinctively national artistic develop- ment, even though it follows lines other than those that held across the Channel.

Coincidently with the building of Westminster went on such works as the retro-choir of Exeter, the presbytery of Lincoln, the nave of Lichfield, and Tin- tern Abbey, wherein are the first signs of change from Early English to Geometrical. This process was con- tinued up to the end of the century, and in the works of its last quarter are to be found the highest attain- ments of English art. Carlisle choir and east front, Guis- borough and Pershore choirs, and St. Mary's Abbey, York, are all expressed in a type of art that rises to the level of the highest attainments of man. The exqui- site line-composition of Pershore and of York Abbeys, the refinement combined with masculine strength, the swift, steel-like curves of the moulding profiles, the perfected beauty of the carved foliage, together with the masterly arrangement of the lines and spaces of light, the hollows and depths of shade — all work together to build up a masterly art. Much of the pro- duct of this time has perished, and even of York Ab- bey, which seems to have represented the high-water mark of pure English design, nothing remains except a shattered aisle wall, a crossing pier, and a few piles of marble fragments. Though at the beginning of the nineteenth century the greater portion of the fabric was intact, about 1820 it was sold to speculators to be burned into lime.

During the first half of the fourteenth century archi- tectural progress was cumulative, reaching its apogee during the reign of Etiward III. The fine simplicity and almost Hellenic feeling for line visible in the work of the preceding half century, and that gives it a place in this respect in advance of any other Gothic work of any time or people, has yielded to decorative richness, the multiplication of ornament and detail, and an in- tricate composition of hght and shade. The incom- parable carving of Lincoln and Wells, York Abbey, West Walton, and Llandaff, architectural yet with all the qualities of form that are found in the noblest sculpture, yields first to the lovely, but dangerously naturahstic, type of Southwell chapter house, and then to the globular forms, the bulbous modeUing, and the effete curves of Patrington, lleckington, and the fourteenth-century tombs of Beverley and Ely. Curvilinear window tracery, in all its suave grace, has taken the place of the fine and vigorous geometrical forms as of Xetley, advanced a stage beyond the pro- totypes of France. Finally, the brilliantly articulated lieme vaulting, with its intermediate ribs emphasizing the verticality of the composition and carrying out to

completion in the roof the fine drawing of multiple piers and moulded arches, is swerving towards the un- justifiable type that came just before the fan vault, 1. e. the criss-crossing of a network of purely decora- tive ribs over the vault-surfaces in violation of struc- tural principle.

Decadence and perfect achievement go hand in hand — Exeter nave, the finest English interior remain- ing intact, on the one hand. Wells presbytery, on the other. But whatever the weaknesses that were show- ing themselves, they entered little into the make-up of the great parish churches, which represent, more than the episcopal and monastic structures, the genius of the period. This was one of the three great epochs of such parish architecture in England, and it is not to be forgotten that the true qualities of English Gothic art reveal themselves quite as fully in the minor as in the major buildings of this country. For a full century, i. e. from 1350 until 1450, the history of EngUsh Gothic is largely a history of parish church-building. The Black Death, which in 1349 smote the land with a pes- tilence that cut its population almost in halves, was followed by the Wars of the Roses, and the peace and prosperity of Edward III did not wholly return until the accession of Henry VII. During this long period, however, the trend of stylistic development was wholly changed by the remarkable innovations initiated by Abbot Thokey at Gloucester in 1330, and carried on by WUham of Wykeham at Winchester from 1380. " The supreme importance of Gloucester in the history of the later Gothic has never been adequately recog- nized. She turned the current of English architecture in a wholly new direction. But for Gloucester, Eng- lish Decorated work might well have developed into a Flamboyant as rich and fanciful as that of France. But to the remotest corners of the land, to cathedral, abbey church, collegiate and parish church, there was brought the influence of Gloucester by the countless pilgrims to the shrine of Edward the Second in her choir" (Bond, op. cit., VII, 134). The manifest ten- dencies of Decorated — not, it must be confessed, of the most promising kind — were terminated, and instead a new progress was instituted towards the development of what we now know as Perpendicular " the first style of architecture that can properly be called English " (Moore, op. cit., VI, 212). Hitherto English Gothic has been rather a lovely overlaying of Continental principles by a distinctively racial decoration and a certain fine fastidiousness of design, with minor modi- fications of plan and system that left the foundations intact, so far as they had been apprehended and as- similated. Now was to come a perfectly independent manifestation in which system, design, and decoration were all new and all exclusively English. The adop- tion of the French scheme of a structural framework, the walls being no longer of masonry, but of glass set in a thin scaffolding of stone mullions, was at last adopted, but its working-out bore almost no relation whatever to the French method. Before the archi- tectural revolution there were signs that sense of pro- portion and composition was decaying, as for example in the Lady Chapel of Ely (1321), which has almost no architectonic qualities to conunend it, but, whether William of Wykeham or profounder psychological in- fluences are responsil:>le, the fact remains that the dan- ger was averted, and England recalled to sounder principles, which resulted in a new life in Gothic that persisted until Henry VIII and the regents under Ed- ward VI brought the whole epoch of medieval civiliza- tion to an end and surrendered an unwilling people to the Reformation. Winchester nave and York choir; Westminster Hall, King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and St. George's, Windsor; Sherborne and Malvern, the choir vault of Oxford cathedral and the chapel of Henry VII at Westminster, together with the major part of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, the great central towers of many of the cathedrals and abbeys,